(James Carpenter) The 2013 Constantine S. Niarchos Expedition to Australia was a joint
expedition; the first of its kind between the American Museum of Natural History and
the New York Botanical Garden.
Our itinerary on the expedition was to arrive from Adelaide to Brisbane. Ride the River Murray in South Australia, then up the Darling River to
Broken Hill, and then over to Bourke, then up to Cunnamulla and east to Brisbane.
Australia is a fascinating continent, biologically it is one of the most fascinating on Earth. It
has numerous groups of animals and plants that are found nowhere else and that have
considerable evolutionary importance. Think, for example, of marsupials.
Our goals for the expedition were collection of pollen wasps and their host plants to see whether there
was cospeciation, whether the evolutionary history of the plants mirrors that of the
wasps. The Masarinae are the only group of solitary wasps that act like bees, that is,
they don't store prey in their nest, they instead collect pollen and nectar and store that in their nests.
The wasps have a restricted set of plants that they use as hosts.
So, because they're restricted to a relatively small number of host species, one may anticipate
that they could evolve specializations that allow them to take advantage of aspects of
the plant morphology. For example, the wasp Metaparagia that has its host Goodeniacae,
in the Goodenias, the flower has a very long tube, and so the Metaparagia correspondingly
have a very long tongue compared to Paragia, the other genus in Australia, which has a
very short tongue, and its host, the Eucalyptus, they have a very open, shallow bowl of a flower.
(Dennis Stevenson) So if we can establish that the wasps were pollinating those plants,
what happens is the plants become to depend upon the wasps to take the pollen from one plant
to another. So the plant may undergo some mutations that allow it to have a structure
that attracts more and more wasps to it. (James Carpenter) To validate a theory of co-evolution,
you can't just find the wasp, you just can't find its plant host, you have to find them
both together, so that you can have a record of an association, which is why it was crucial
when in this case for botanists be along collecting with me, where as I'm using an aerial net to, to
swipe wasps on the wing, the botanist is cutting plants and making collecting sheets.
Your primary challenge of this expedition was being in the outback during an incredible drought.
(David Stevenson) Botanically, although very interesting, you hardly knew what anything
was because hardly anything had leaves. There was no ground cover for us. (James Carpenter)
We had intended to collect Goodeniaceae and the Metaparagia that were on Goodeniaceae,
but once we got into the outback, we only saw one Goodenia flower the entire time, so
that collecting part was basically off, no host records there, so we switched over largely
to looking for Paragia, working on the Eucalyptus, or gum trees, as they call them in Australia.
To make their nests, these wasps do not collect mud. Instead, they go to water, fill their
crock with water, then go to dry soil and make their own mud, so if you can find the
water source, it concentrates them. (David Stevenson) Jim had to collect around these
puddles, and the plants weren't there, and I realized if I had pollen samples from all
the plants around, ("Flowers, wow!") then I could match the pollen that we might find
on his specimen to a plant. What we did find that was exciting to me, was, we found a plant
family, the Proteaceae, actually have wasp pollenators, and that was unknown, for that family. (James
Carpenter) One of the most notable discoveries that we made was a new species of Paragia
and was have some host records for it, too, so it's even better. In addition to that,
of the known species we collected, because we collected five species, we have seven locality
records that are new. We both believe that collecting trips begin and end in collections.
In this case, that means we began by first compiling records from labeled data of plants
and insects so that we had an idea what localities we should go to, and we ended in the collections,
as well, because there's follow-up research to be done with the material we collected,
which is now been deposited in our respective collections.(David Stevenson)
I think one of the really important things about this expedition is that it brings institutions
together, that have different expertise, to apply to a problem. I think it'd be much better
in some ways if we had more botanists than zoologists going together into the field.